Daily Kos/SEIU State of the Nation Poll:

Tue Apr 03, 2012 at 09:00 AM PDT

Despite makeover, key parts of Ryan plan are very unpopular

by David NirFollow for Daily Kos

Paul Ryan and the Republicans decided to double down on a bad bet last week and issue version 2.0 of the Ryan budget plan which caused them so much grief last year. Of course, the changes were largely cosmetic, and the plan is just as retrogressive as ever. But you never know how well an attempted political makeover is working until you do some research, so we decided to ask voters how they felt about a couple of key aspects of the latest iteration of the Ryan plan.
Public Policy Polling for Daily Kos & SEIU. 3/29-4/1. Registered voters. MoE ±3.1% (no trendlines):

Q: Do you support or oppose lowering the tax rate for the wealthiest individuals and businesses from 35% to 25%? Support: 27
Oppose: 64
Unsure: 8

You naturally have to wonder who those 27% are—do they think they'll benefit from these proposed tax cuts? It's possible they do, but if you look at our crosstabs by income, you'll see that opposition is almost perfectly uniform regardless of what bracket you're in, even for the over $100K crowd. What's propping these numbers up is that a good portion of Republicans recognize a partisan issue when they see one, and 42% have forced themselves to believe that a huge tax cut that will only go to the 1%ers is actually a good thing for America (or at least, that liberals must hate the idea). But even 46% of self-identified GOPers aren't on board. That makes this an awfully tough sell.

Q: Do you support or oppose cutting federal Medicaid spending by $810 billion over the next 10 years? Support: 24
Oppose: 59
Unsure: 16

Even though Medicaid, a program which mainly helps the poor, tends to poll less well than Medicare or Social Security, a very broad majority also opposed Ryan's aim of dramatically slashing Medicaid's budget. Interestingly, Republicans like this idea even less than they do cutting taxes on corporations and the rich—and of course, Democrats and independents are broadly opposed. Last year's debate over the Ryan plan was so one-sided that it showed there were some pigs that even the GOP's Mighty Wurlitzer couldn't apply sufficient lipstick to. This new polling confirms that if Republicans want to make support for Ryan's budget a major campaign plank as they head toward November, they're once again going to have a very harsh time of it.
P.S. As always, our approval and favorability numbers can be found on our weekly trends page.